There were only a half-dozen people in the theater in the southeastern city of Ningbo, and the film left him feeling perplexed. “It was very light-hearted,” Mr. Hu said, but he didn’t like how it portrayed wealthy Chinese people as “having old-fashioned thoughts and behaviors that are in poor taste.”
“Crazy Rich Asians,” a Cinderella tale of a young Chinese-American woman romanced by the handsome scion of an extremely wealthy family from Singapore, was a box-office smash in the U.S. this summer. American viewers and critics applauded the movie for its predominantly Asian cast, and the movie won domestic sales of nearly $174 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
In China, home to the world’s largest population of Asians, it is bombing. Nationwide ticket sales have barely topped $1.4 million so far. Empty theaters have forced cinemas to cancel thousands of planned screenings. One online reviewer compared the movie to General Tso’s chicken, a uniquely American dish rarely found in China.
Warner Bros., which distributed the movie, declined to comment. A representative for Kevin Kwan, who wrote the book the movie was based on, didn’t respond to requests for comment. He told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, “I based the book on a very small group of elite Chinese Singaporeans and am only really portraying the world in it.”
In a year dominated by rising political and economic tensions between the U.S. and China, “Crazy Rich Asians” has been derided by some locals as another example of America’s presumption about China’s ways. The China flop points to a cultural disconnect—Chinese viewers say they don’t identify with the film’s displays of excessive wealth or the fish-out-of-water earnestness of its Asian-American heroine.
The movie’s plot centers around a New York University economics professor who is invited by her hunky boyfriend to his best friend’s wedding in Singapore. She discovers her beau is part of the country’s uber-wealthy, a class defined by private jets, island-hopping and million-dollar shopping sprees. At one point, a palatial home is likened to a cross between Versailles and a Donald Trump bathroom.
In another scene, the male protagonist’s mother purchases a swanky London hotel after being snubbed by its management.
It “reinforced the stereotype that Chinese people now are rich, and all they do is buy, buy, buy,” said Ma Yinchen, a 33-year-old financial professional in Shanghai.
Ms. Ma, however, praised the movie for featuring good-looking Asian actors with chiseled abs. She said it could help counter Western beliefs that Asians don’t work out.
Chinese exhibitors cut the movie’s daily showings to some 7,600 Wednesday, down from about 29,000 last Friday when it made its debut in China, according to 58921.com, a website that tracks box-office sales in China.
Zhen Pei, manager of the Cinker Cinemas theater in Beijing’s upscale Raffles City mall, said the film had performed so poorly that the theater plans to replace it with “Aquaman” starting on Friday. In the past three days, the cinema sold only five tickets for six screenings.
“We can’t afford to keep a movie that no one wants to see,” she said.
The film’s opening in China came nearly four months after the American premiere. One factor in the slow ticket sales could be that Chinese audiences who really wanted to see the film already downloaded the movie or bought bootlegged copies, both common practices in China—although that hasn’t prevented some American films from becoming hits in Chinese theaters.
Yu Jirui, a Beijing tour guide and self-described cinephile, said he has long been a fan of independent films from the U.S. and elsewhere. On Monday this week, he was holding a bagful of bootleg DVDs including “The Children Act” (a drama starring Emma Thompson) and “Mara” (a supernatural horror film).
The 55-year-old said that after reading reviews of “Crazy Rich Asians,” he dismissed the movie as “a typical brainless love story.” He also didn’t want to watch a movie about Chinese people filtered through the lens of American filmmakers. He said the U.S., especially through cultural outlets such as Hollywood blockbusters, tends to simplify China.
“We’re either shown as backwards and dirty, or wealthy with no morals,” Mr. Yu said. “Americans just don’t understand us. I know rich people in China, and they don’t act like that,” he added, referring to the characters’ frivolous spending in the movie.
Winnie Sun, a financial adviser in Irvine, Calif., said she’s seen the movie twice since its U.S. premiere despite a predictable plot and less-than-convincing characters. She said she was eager to support a big-budget film that spotlighted Asian actors in “smart ways” that required humor, sophistication and darkness.
“It was nice to see Asian people portray these roles that would normally go to regular American celebrities,” said Ms. Sun, who was born in Los Angeles.
Shanghai-based writer Lenora Chu, who grew up in Houston, was also thrilled to see Asian actors in a Hollywood film. She worked as an actor in Los Angeles from 2004 to 2010, she said, and many of the casting notices that came her way fell into four categories: prostitute, IT worker, martial artist or dead person.
Ms. Chu, who helped organize two charity screenings of “Crazy Rich Asians” last Friday, said that an all-Asian cast was less noteworthy in China. “Issues of minority representation in Hollywood, issues of cross-cultural romance—those are not wide-scale here as they are in the U.S.,” she said.
After a matinee showing in Beijing on Wednesday, 37-year-old Wang Jingling said she enjoyed the film’s over-the-top glamour and gorgeous scenery. However, she said it had a distinctly American viewpoint on Asians that Chinese people might find offensive or naive.
The well-heeled socialites, she said, are shown living in a “soulless” world fueled by designer clothes and decadent parties. “It makes Asians seem like they don’t have culture or class, just money,” said Ms. Wang, who studied abroad in England when she was in college. Using a Chinese phrase for enduring suffering, she said, “A lot of us know how to eat bitterness.”
Source: Wall Street Journal by Shan Li